Development of an expert system for the process design of axisymmetric hot steel forging

An expert system has been developed to automate the process design of axisymmetric hot steel forging. It designs the geometries of the finisher, blocker, buster, billet and corresponding dies and calculates the required forging load, the volume and the strokes, from the geometry of a machined part. It is a rule-based system written in Fortran and AutoLISP and operates in the AutoCAD environment. The rules and the structure used in the system are presented and an example of a forging process design performed with the system is discussed in this paper. To compensate for the insufficiency of blocker design rules, the concept of shape and volume factors is introduced. It is recommended that the finite element analysis should be used to determine the appropriate values of the factors.